Remnants
by Necessary Chocolate
Summary: There's a lie in every truth she tells, and a truth in every lie. Marceline-centric.


Word Count: 1,505  
>A look into Marceline's mind and everything that (most likely) happened or might happen.<br>Because she seems like the type of character to have hidden depths below her hidden depths.  
>And everyone worries, besides. :D<p>

Warnings: No pairings, just close friendship. And mentions of "The Mushroom War", which I'm pretty sure was World War 3 or 4, so a lot of mentions of death.

* * *

><p>There's a lie in every truth she tells.<p>

Marceline is secretive by nature. She's always been like that, even in the days before what she would begin to call the Mushroom War, before the days that she was bitten. She coined the name "Mushroom War" herself, when she was a child; because even though the humans died around her she was still too young to get _why_. To understand that the mushroom clouds were made by bombs, bombs designed to wipe out life.

She grew up quickly in such a world. While the rest of her ages slowly now, giving her the appearance of a young woman in her earlier twenties (maybe the older teens), she's been around for over a millennia. Her one-thousandth birthday passed with a wish to go home, and one year later, she did. She traveled Ooo for many years, watching the species that had come about in the aftermath of the mushroom war, from the Fire Kingdom to the Sand Lands to the Candy Kingdom. The Candy Kingdom was a favorite place of her's for a long time. Red that came from a candy-person was always sweeter than other reds, almost like the red from strawberries or the inside of watermelons. The royals had chased her out though, some snot named Bubblegum (who later had her great-granddaughter named after her, because the human-candy hybrids were unimaginative like that) because Marceline had sucked all the red from her hair. Marceline was made to look like a traitor, and exiled from the kingdom. (Not that she lived there. The Vampire Queen had no set home, even after she killed the Vampire King.)

Nearly one-hundred years after her banishment or exile or whatever, she'd found her way back to her home on her one-thousand-and-first birthday, where she met Finn and Jake.

The storm set up the scene perfectly, a girl who hadn't been to the house that she built in over seven hundred years (nine-hundred? Sometimes she couldn't keep count.) finally going home, only to find two people (or, a human and a dog) living there instead.

She hadn't seen any humans in a long time – the closest things were the hyoo-mans who she'd visited once, who did not like her in the least, and the candy-human hybrids that existed since the Mushroom War itself, many of whom had died out by some plague when Bubblegum (the younger one, the one that Marceline knew now) was only ten or eleven.

So she'd decided to have a little fun with them, but once they were gone… It was far too easy, and the house much too empty.

In truth, the house was full of junk and books and papers, drawings and posters, furniture, too. It was full of _life_, full of _home_, full of Finn and Jake. A house she didn't belong in, a world she wasn't meant to belong in.

If she didn't age so slowly, she'd be long dead by now, buried underground and possibly unthinking. Maybe she'd be a ghost, haunting the living things now. But even as she sat in their sofa (trying not to float for once, trying to feel some remnant of comfort) she couldn't shake the feeling of not belonging, so she'd left for her cave-home, the place she lived for about fifty years before she began to travel. Finding Finn and Jake there served only to anger her – and amuse her as well. How unlucky these two must be, to move into the Vampire Queen's former home twice? So she began to play around.

She might have actually killed Jake if Finn hadn't knocked him from her hands – she didn't know. All she knew was what it felt like, to have something ripped from your hands, weightier it was food back in the Scavenging Days, as she now called them, or having her teddy bear taken away, or even her _life_, which was taken from her in the form of a bite (though she wasn't so bitter about that anymore. The only downside was not being able to be in sunlight and that any mortal friends she made would either die or grow to resent her.)

And she snapped.

And then she fought Finn the human, and actually found herself having fun. Fun, fighting with a _mortal_. Billy had never tried to fight her, claiming that she was not truly evil, but then again, Marceline hadn't been one to goad people back then. Her life was separated into intervals, the Scavenging Days, the Red Days, the Goading Days. If she didn't separate her life like this, she would have gone insane long ago. These days, though, her life was separated into three different parts, some all interlocking even once or twice a day.

There was time she spent with Finn & Jake, time she spent with Bonibel Bubblegum, and time she spent either alone or with her immortal friends. She'd been wary of making friends with mortals after so long. For the first few hundred years, she kept trying, but it just kept hurting over and over and over again when they grew old and died.

Two she'd turned into vampires, and they'd left after a century or so each, both resenting her and themselves for their lengthened lifespans. She couldn't keep doing that. (And it _killed _Candy-People. They didn't handle being undead well.)

But Finn, Jake and Bubblegum…

_They're going to die one day._

The thoughts were unbearable, pressing against her whenever she wasn't with them. They were the first mortal friends she'd had in nearly six-hundred years. They would die. They would grow old, probably marry and have babies and then get older and more feeble and then they would die, all the while Marceline would look on, a friend (maybe a lover, too?) to comfort them, and vice versa.

So she didn't hold back. Mostly. She was secretive by nature.

When she told them, _I'm your friend._ She didn't tell them that she loved them dearly, even after only a few months which might as well have been days to her one-thousand year old self. When she told them that she didn't want to hang out with them, the lie was in that she didn't want to be hurt when they finally left this earth, while she let them believe that she meant hang out as in _right now_.

Spending time with the three of them (and a few more, like Lady Rainicorn or LSP, who could both be hilarious at times) always had an excuse that was partially true anyways.

_I don't want you to die._ She has the thought every time her age is brought up in conversation. She's seen so many people die, even when she was a kid and believed that death was 'going away'. It's inescapable, and she can't bring it up or else Finn will laugh and say that she should spend more time with them, then. Princess Bubblegum would try to come up with some logic or science-y way to do things, to work everything out. Maybe she'd suggest taking away her immortality.

She didn't want them to die, but she didn't want to die, either. Marceline had a morbid sense of humor, and monsters and death made for great jokes even if only her ghostly friends got it. Bubblegum told her that it was 'distasteful'. The princess was fond of long words like that.

_I'm going to miss you guys._ She had said, maybe a week ago, maybe a year ago. She'd gone on a night-picnic by the Fire Kingdom with the four of them – Finn, Bubblegum, Jake, Lady. All of them looked at her oddly, because hey, Finn was only thirteen (maybe fourteen…), Jake was twenty-one (twenty-two? Years passed quickly in her head) and the princess was nineteen – she remembered her age, because her birthday had been a while ago. They were all young and healthy, in their prime, but Marceline knew that their life would fly in her memories, it would fly by, and she'd be left wondering why she'd made friends with mortals again, why she'd let herself love them, why she didn't do this or that. It would be like that for years before it faded, after which the memories would be locked up in the vault at the back of her mind of things she didn't wish to think about.

There is a truth in every lie she utters, and a lie in every truth. It's become a habit, ever-present, to the point where she doesn't even notice it any longer.

Marceline the Vampire Queen laughs with them, anyways.


End file.
